Keyword-based search engines like YouTube and Yahoo Image offer interfaces that assist users in finding relevant results for ambiguously-named topics. For instance, on Yahoo Image (http://images.search.yahoo.com), if the user is looking for images of the TV show “24” and types “24”, the interface will present a list of items that begin with “24”, including “24 TV show”. When the user selects this latter option, the user is shown only images of the TV show. Thus, the user through direct contact with the search tool provides disambiguation information to select the option of interest.
More often than not, the simple name of an entity suffices to connect a user to a result about that entity, either because the name is inherently unambiguous (e.g., “Inxs”), or more likely, because the user's interests align sufficiently with those of the community of other users and content creators to enable creation of a system that distills a broad consensus about the meaning of the name. Nevertheless, there are domains in which names can be highly (and deliberately) ambiguous (e.g., movie names such as “W”, album titles such as “Blue”), challenging even the most successful keyword-based search engines to find relevant results using only a name. Moreover, for those users whose interest in a name lies outside that broad consensus, success in finding a result pertinent to that interest using only the name is unlikely.
The past several years have seen a proliferation of search engine Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), enabling development of a wide range of “mash-up” applications that intermediate between the user and a search engine. In response to keyword queries, these APIs deliver not only web pages (e.g., Yahoo BOSS Web Search, Google Web Search, Microsoft Bing) and other text media (e.g., Yahoo BOSS News Search, Twitter), but also non-textual media. Services like YouTube, which provides access to videos, and Flickr, which provides access to images, permit users to upload text descriptions and keywords with their media offerings, thereafter permitting search by keywords. Services like Yahoo BOSS Image search and Microsoft Bing crawl the web, finding non-text media and using the text that accompanies these media for keyword annotation.
These search engine APIs enable the providing of a rich array of content to create compelling new applications. However, when such search engines offer an API to an intermediary application, the ability to engage the user's knowledge to make the search more specific by direct interaction is lost. Consequently, even though the user may have already declared an interest in a specific entity in the intermediary application, if this application retrieves results from a search API using only an entity's name, it may retrieve results that are mistakenly not about the entity of interest. Thus, by disengaging the user from direct interaction with the search engine, these API's sacrifice access to the disambiguation techniques based on user interaction, leaving them susceptible to the basic problems of ambiguity inherent in keyword search.